


A Boy, His Mother, and the Lies Between Them

by TheShadowsAreNotWatching



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Pre-Canon, Spoilers, spoilers episode 85
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9653195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheShadowsAreNotWatching/pseuds/TheShadowsAreNotWatching
Summary: Scanlan has told a lot of lies. Scanlan has had a lot of thoughts about his mother. Sometimes those two facts intersect(Alternatively, My First Fic Is Me Throwing Up My Unbeta'd Scanlan Feelings and Hoping It Sticks)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Uh. Hi.  
> This is like an unholy union between first fic and unbeta'd nightmare. But it's a Scanlan-centric fic after 85 and I really want one of those right now. So expect both grammatical errors and tense changes as well as angst. 
> 
> I hope I didn't accidently steal someone's headcanon, I've been reading so much lately it's all kind of mixing with mine own. I did shamelessly steal the Gnomish joke from Terry Prattchet because it's fitting and because every vertically challenged race would probably have an equivalent. I tried, enjoy.

              Scanlan Shorthalt was born in love.  For all their poverty and common blood, his mother loved like a duchess, loved him extravagantly and richly and in a way that would move mountains and break earth. When he was little (well, littler), she would sing crooning songs, tuck back his hair, and tell him she loved him enough for both parents. Honestly, the low-low-high-low of her voice meant more to him than any words about fatherhood ever could. Scanlan didn’t care about him. His mom had no family so it was just them, two Shorthalts against the world. Why should it matter? Who needs a dad when he has his mom? The sun shined, shit stank, and his mother loved him. This was enough.

(Later, he would tell himself, that this was enough for his life. These memories were enough. It didn’t matter that no one loved him now, because once upon a time, someone loved him more than life itself.)

(He always was a skilled liar.)

*****

              “Mom,” he starts, as she does the washing, “why the fuck are humans so tall”

              His mother raised an eyebrow, giving an appraising glance at his blood stained (wrinkleless) clothes and his out-of-place (tangle-less) hair and the split lip that, if anything, enhanced his (manful) pout. “Get chased out of your usual spot, kiddo?”

              “Not a kiddo, Mom, I’m _twelve._ ” He reminds her, “The kids are just angry because I earn more playing than they do begging. I don’t know why they’re surprised. Music makes people feel good. Starving children makes people feel guilty.”

              His mother did not look particularly impressed with this bit of kind philosophy. “Did you ever think that this wisdom might cause some of your bruises?”

              “I don’t say it, I’m not stupid. I keep my mouth my shut and my head down,” his mother did not look like she believed this truth, which, fair, “I just make more coin than they do so they try to steal it. Nothing to do with kindness, everything to do with survival and the fact that they’re bigger than me.”  At this, though, Scanlan reaches into his arm sleeve and pulls out some silver, some copper and hands it over to his mother.

              Juniper reaches down and takes a little less than half of the coin. “Good job, you must have played well. You always do.” She says fondly. “Considering the state of your face, I’m surprised you kept your money”

             “I said that humans were _tall_ , not clever.”

             His mom wraps him up in a tight hug and starts blotting at some of his cuts. She hums a little while she works, a song she been singing since he was a kid, the low-low-high-low notes laced with a small bit of healing magic. “You know you don’t have to do this, right? I don’t earn a lot of coin, but I earn enough. I can take a few more hours, I don’t want you getting hurt.”

             Scanlan takes a second to look at his mother, her calloused hands, the patches meticulously sewed on her old clothes, the tired lines already appearing on a gnome so young, “I like playing. It’s what I do. I want to do it forever, asshole human kids or not.”

             “Who taught you to speak like that?” She asks mock-offendedly

             “You” and he smiles when delivering this absolute truth.

              She laughs, ruffles his hair and says “then let me give you some advice one gnome to another. Even if you _were_ keeping your head down, don’t, the world will come at you with its teeth bared no matter how meek you are. Might as well be yourself when fighting it. And most things will be bigger than you, so be smarter. And if you can’t be smarter, be cleverer and fight dirty. And if you can’t do that, then make them laugh and run the fuck away. I know it feels unfair sometimes, that we reach their thighs, but, well, _gaesh kra’zakh ker gorell,_ kiddo.”

(Later, after fighting some fuck-you huge giant, licking his wounds with Vax, the half-elf asks _how the fuck do you do it, how the fuck do you fight these things when you only come up to their knees?_

And Scanlan could point out that size has little to do with magic and how hard you can hit with it, but he remembers how dinky Vax’s daggers looked against the thing and says, _gaesh kra’zakh ker gorell_ , kid.

 _Gnomish?_ Vax asks. Scanlan nods and tells Vax that it means that all trees are felled at the same height. Vax’s face gets slightly less broody and says that he likes that and asks Scanlan to repeat it one more time.)

(Pike gives him a questioning look when she hears Vax yell in gnomish that his teeth are level with their opponent’s groin, but he smiles and winks and asks her to keep the lie alive just a little bit longer.)

*****

              When he is 15, he is playing at a shitty tavern with a shitty band for shitty pay. His bandmates miss half their notes and Scanlan’s magnificent flute playing isn’t enough to save them. He reminds himself that this gig is better than playing his flute out in the cold of winter, when his fingers freeze and get clumsy, and _he’s_ the one to miss his notes.

              Scanlan knows this, but it doesn’t stop his internal screaming when the drunk patrons shout at them to play Wonderous Wall. Which is the one song of the night his bandmates can apparently play, like the assholes they are. He smiles wide and keeps his thoughts occupied on home, she promised chicken for dinner. Meat’s expensive, he knows, and there’s a part of him that wishes his mom would spend less on him and more on herself. Still, her chicken is the best thing Scanlan’s ever had and it’s better than thinking about how off-tempo their drummer is.

              The nights not completely ruined, he gets in one killer flute solo, based off the same the song his mother used to sing to him. He’s changed the arrangement a bit, added a bit more pizzas, but the foundations are still the same. The song is cheesy, but it’s warm and nostalgic and its good tavern music. When it’s really, really cold out, Scanlan’ll play it and passerby’s will swear they feel a bit warmer. The song is a Shorthalt specialty and it’s one of the few pieces their audience doesn’t heckle them for.

              The gig ends somewhere around 1 AM and he quickly gets his pay and heads home. He’s known around the town, the small kid with a big voice, but the streets are dark at this hour and he has a long way to walk. He and his mother live outside the lord’s walls with most of the citizens. They live where it’s not exactly safe to be walking out during the night, even if the neighbors know you, even if you have dark vision.

              When he gets outside the walls, though, it’s not dark like he expected. The streets are perfectly illuminated _because everything’s on fucking fire_. Faintly he hears bells going off in the distance, sees armored men running around, sees green corpses littering the ground, and breaks off into a run himself. When he slams opens the door to his home, he is not alone. There are five goblins crouched around something, they look up when he enters.

              “Leave!” he roars, rushing forward, and for some reason the creatures listen, skittering out like the vermin they are. Scanlan doesn’t think about how weird that is till later, doesn’t think about how his voice sounded like more, like it was double-layered. He doesn’t think, in that moment, about how he should’ve fucking killed the goblins. He should’ve ripped off their heads with his teeth, should’ve made them suffer. All he can think about his mother—his beautiful, kind mother; his talented, graceful mother—whose corpse is lying on the floor.

              If this was a song, she’d be serene in her death. If this were a song, he would’ve gotten there in time to hear one last _I love you._ If this were a song, he could’ve fucking protected her.

              But it’s not and she died at least an hour ago, with only fucking goblins to hear her screams.

              Scanlan looks down at her and just doesn’t. He can’t fucking do anything. He’s helpless and hopeless and he doesn’t know what to do. He goes into his room, shocked, in a daze, and stares up at the ceiling until morning.

              (Later, he’ll tell people his life changed that day, but that’s not, strictly speaking true. It takes him a good 24 hours to get himself together. He didn’t save his mother, didn’t give her comfort as she passed, didn’t kill those fuckers who took her away from him.  His life changed not when he found the body, but much later when he woke up and his first thought was _my mother is dead_.)

              (It’s functionally the same thing, this lie, but it’s still a lie to him. Saying that his life changed when his mother was ripped apart by goblins is different from saying his life changed 24 hours later when it actually meant something to him. The immediacy of the phrasing makes him a bit better, the grieving son instead of the spineless coward.  Maybe some people would argue, it’s not a lie, but, well. It takes a liar to know the truth and no one’s a better liar than Scanlan.)

*****

              He sells everything they had, which isn’t much. It’s enough to afford a little graveyard plot for his mother. He tries to pay a cleric, but the kindly human just looks at him and says he’ll do it for free. When the cleric says final rights over the gravestone plot, he doesn’t know if should feel angry or grateful at the pity.

              He needs the coin, though, desperately. After the goblin invasion, there’s a lot more orphans and a lot less coin that people are willing to give to street performers. He tries to find taverns that’ll trade his playing for a room, but there just aren’t that many taverns.

              He sleeps on the streets, often. He learns a lot. Scanlan learns about cruelty and violence and sex and other things he kind of wishes to forget. You learn a lot when you’re at your lowest, your brain gets sharper with the hunger pangs in your stomach. Here is his hard-won knowledge: the world is deeply shitty. This isn’t enough.

              (But he’s not Vax, he’s not Percy. He’s not going to fucking brood about his past. They were dark times, but they’re over. Things are better now. He doesn’t want to talk about the details. He doesn’t want to talk about it at all. It’s better this way.)

              (When he visited his mom’s grave, during this… period, all he talked about were the songs he learned. He played them for her, like he did when she was alive, and tried really hard not to think about lies of omission.)

*****

              It didn’t take him long to leave the town where he grew up. It wasn’t a hard decision. There was no one here for him now, nothing tying him down. He was a man now (well, by human standards) and he needed to go see the world and the people it contained. He promised his mother’s grave that he’d be back soon and then he’s off.

              It was great, honestly. He found a group of performers who were decent and in need of a flautist. He traveled all over. He learned things—the lute, girls, the shawm, some really bawdy songs, boys, how to pickpocket. He went to bed, drunk off that night’s performance as well as some ale, and woke up and started drinking again.

              He changed troupes all the time. Sometimes, they disbanded. Sometimes, he fucked the singer and they kicked him out. Sometimes, he just got bored. He went where the wind took him, but he had no real problems finding employment. Necessity had honed his charm into a weapon and it was rare he found a group that wouldn’t be willing to take him along. The fact that he was fucking amazing didn’t hurt either.

              He traveled, a decade-and-a-half, sticking to the South where the winters were warm. He was a gnome of delicate sensibilities, after all. He finally wound his back to his home town, guilty eroding his want to never set foot in the place again. He walks, dreading, to his mother’s grave. Sure, she can’t yell at him now, but still.

              His feet carry him mechanically to her plot. He blinks as he looked up. This wasn’t her. It had been awhile, he reasons. He just forgot the location, that’s all. But the day waned and he still couldn’t fucking find it. He found a groundskeeper instead.

              “You there! Hello, I need your assistance.” The groundskeeper looked down, then up, studiously ignoring him. Scanlan shouts louder and, in turn, was ignored louder.

              “This isn’t any way to treat a _friend_ ” he says, layering arcane magic onto the last word. “I’m looking for the plot of Juniper Shorthalt.”

              The groundskeeper looks apologetic. “There’s a lot of dead and not a lot of land in the city. Family’s die, people move. If there’s a grave that hasn’t been visited in a while, sometimes we clear it in order to make way…”

              Scanlan looks him in the eye, gaze flat. “You’re fucking kidding me.” Rage boils and he loses concentration on the spell. Immediately, the groundskeeper reels back and has the audacity to look offended. When the groundskeeper starts shouting, Scanlan just turns around and flips him off, the diaphanous fabric of his purple blouse’s sleeve gently billowing in the breeze.

              He goes to the bar that night and drinks like he’s never drunk before. He makes two promises that night he has the misfortune to remember both. One, he promised an enterprising half-orc fiddler that he’d show him how real music is played. The half-orc looked unimpressed at this tiny gnome who heckled him and challenged to a musical duel, winner takes the losers gold. And two, he promised his mother that even if he couldn’t visit her grave, he’d think of her every day. At the time, he thought it was an easy promise. For his entire life, he thought of her every day. All he had to do was not quit.

              (Promises Scanlan has broke:

  1. When he was 5, he promised his mom that he’d always protect her
  2. When he was 8, he promised his mom that one day he’d be rich and famous and he’d buy her a house
  3. When he was 14, his mom started crying. He doesn’t remember why. But she made him promise that when he grew up, he’d be a happy and decent person. ~~He’s neither.~~
  4. When he was 18, he promised her grave that he would be back.
  5. When he was 18 until he was 52, he promised a lot of girls/boys/other that he’d be there in the morning, that he’d be back for them one day, that _this was magical, baby, how could I leave you_
  6. He promised he would think of his mother every day
  7. At 55, he promised his daughter that he wouldn’t die



He didn’t mean to break them. Well, most of them. He promised a good 60% of them with his best intentions. But he’s old now. He can’t be surprised anymore when he manages to be a disappointment.)

*****

       He keeps the promise to think of her every day for a while. He thinks of her while playing, he thinks of her while fighting, he thinks of her when nothing in particular was going on at all. When he meets Kaylie…

       (…actually, when he meets Kaylie his thoughts were of a different nature entirely.)

       When he knows Kaylie was daughter, he thinks of his mother. Remembers her high-brow and the shape of her eyes. Kaylie took after him and he took after his mother and it was weird, seeing a woman with her features after all this time.

       With the knowledge of his daughter, he thinks of his mother even more. His mom wouldn’t be proud of how he turned out. Would she be angry at him for doing to Sybil what his father did to her? Would he have done it, thrown Sybil over, if his mom was still alive? Somethings weren’t questions and instead just facts. He was sure that she would adore Kaylie, she would ruffle her hair and compliment her spirit. He’s sure the two of them would have gotten on like a house on fire, that Juniper would tell Kaylie his childhood stories and share embarrassing facts from when he was pre-pubescent. It would’ve been a nightmare, it makes his heart hurt with longing.

       (During the siege of Emon, when they fought Thordak, when they fought Raishan, when he died, when they fought Raishan (again), when he died (again), all he thought about was Kaylie. His mother didn’t cross his mind until he was shouting at his so-called friends)

*****

(He lied to Vox Machina, at the end. He knows that they killed the Briarwoods because they were awful fucking vampires, that they killed Kevdak and went to the Feywild not to solve Grog and Vex’s family issues, but so they could save the world. 

But it had felt like the truth and it felt like it would hurt so he said it anyways. There was a lot of honesty in that conversation. A lot more than he was used to. They couldn’t argue that they respected him when they dressed him up in a nightgown, covered him in pudding, and placed him in bondage right before telling his daughter to watch over him. They couldn’t argue they knew his mother’s name. The fact that he had never told him mattered less to him at this moment)

              When he walked with Kaylie, a day outside Whitestone, he whistles absent mindedly. _Low-low-high-low_.

              “What’s that?”

              “Just a song. My mother used to sing it to me, I used to play it.” He hesitates. He has made a lifetime habit to not ask questions when he was afraid of the answer.  But…“Would—Would you like to learn it?”

              “Sure” she says, as fake nonchalant as he was, and he couldn’t help the small, genuine smile that sprouts across his face. “What’s it called?”

              He never really thought about it, but his mouth moves automatically “For Juniper.”


End file.
